Customer specific and manufacturer specific price lists

If your price list needs are more than what customer group price lists can handle, you may need to use named price lists, a feature of Handshake Professional.

Named price lists are useful for scenarios like these:

You have a contract with a customer that specifies pricing that applies just to that customer, with the prices expressed either as an across-the-board percentage discount off your standard pricing or as discounted prices for each specially-priced item.

You sell products from multiple manufacturers, and each manufacturer has its own preferred pricing tiers. One of your customers could get platinum pricing from one manufacturer but silver pricing from another.

To explain how it works, we'll run through an example of each scenario.

Let's say you have a customer, ABC Corp, with whom you've negotiated specific pricing for about a quarter of the items in your catalog and agreed to give 5% off regular pricing for all the other items.

Setting up customer-specific price lists

Step 1: Creating the price list

First, you need to create a named price list for ABC Corp, using the price list importer in the "advanced" section of the bulk importer. You'll need to use the following columns:

id: a unique identifier for the price list. If you want to modify the price list with a future import, you'll use the same id.

percentDiscount: the percentage discount that will be applied to regular prices for those items that don't have a price specified in the list.

currency: the currency code applied to all the prices in the list.

Step 2: Specifying the prices

Once you've run the import to create the price list, the next step is to define prices for that price list. Unlike the simpler customer group price lists, for which you can use the item importer or the prices importer, this example requires the prices importer only. You just use a priceList column instead of a customerGroup column, like this:

Note: you can include both a customer group column and a price list column in the prices import, but you can only specify a value for one of the two columns in each line. If you try to specify both, the importer will report an error.

Step 3: Linking the customer to the price list

Finally, you need to link ABC Corp with the new price list. On either Handshake's web interface or the Handshake app, navigate to the Customers section and then to ABC Corp, then click or tap the "View & Edit Price Lists" button. In the drop down, select the price list you created.

Setting up manufacturer-specific price lists

Let's take a more complex example, for reps selling multiple brands. Let's say ABC Corp is a platinum customer for Urban Threads but only a silver customer for Birdland Music. Here's how to handle each step differently from creating a customer-specific price list:

Step 1: Creating the price lists

Here, what's new from the previous example is the manufacturerID column. A price list is scoped to a single manufacturer, so if you're using more than one manufacturer, you'll be using this column.

Step 2: Specifying the prices

No difference here. Just specify prices for both of the price lists.

Step 3: Linking the customer to the price list

This is pretty straightforward as well. Just link ABC Corp to both manufacturers' respective price lists.